It’s time for the American people to organize and to utilize their Second Amendment right to protect themselves from what is clearly become an unaccountable and lawless agency that’s killing Americans.
Do clashes between ideologies reflect policy differences or something more fundamental? The present research suggests they reflect core psychological differences such that liberals express compassion toward less structured and more encompassing entities (i.e., universalism), whereas conservatives express compassion toward more well-defined and less encompassing entities (i.e., parochialism).
Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a. Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Note. The highest value on the heatmap scale is 20 units for liberals, and 12 units for conservatives. Moral circle rings, from inner to outer, are described as follows: (1) all of your immediate family, (2) all of your extended family, (3) all of your closest friends, (4) all of your friends (including distant ones), (5) all of your acquaintances, (6) all people you have ever met, (7) all people in your country, (8) all people on your continent, (9) all people on all continents, (10) all mammals, (11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds, (12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae, (13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms, (14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees, (15) all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks, (16) all things in existence
My guess is both the political left and right will see this, agree with it, and claim moral superiority over their political opponents.
Psychology is interesting in a frightening sort of way.
My takeaway is there is no compromise between the viewpoints. One might as well try to find an acceptable compromise between a murdering rapist and their intended victim.
I need my underground bunker in Idaho to be complete.
I wonder what it means for penis size if someone is both a white nationalist and a gun owner. Of course, these sorts of things really tell us more about the idiots claiming there is a correlation between the two and the target of their insults.
A vast number of humans, probably a majority, aren’t people.
They are large language models.
I’m not saying this as a generality, as a clever or funny way of saying, “they are stupid”.
No. I mean something very concrete and specific, and there are a lot of people who appear very intelligent, maybe even win awards for writing good poetry or something, who are nevertheless not people, not fully sapient, just a large language model walking around in a human body.
First, you have to understand what a large language model is.
It’s a computer (organic or inorganic), which has been trained on a data set consisting solely of language (written or spoken), and rewarded for producing language that sounds like the data set, and is relevant to a prompt.
That’s all there is in there.
This is why ChatGPT and Grok lie to you constantly.
It’s not because they are somehow just indifferent to the truth — they actually do not understand the concept of “truth” at all.
For something to be a “lie”, or an “inaccuracy”, there has to be a mismatch between the meaning of words, and the state of reality.
And there’s the critical difference. You see, in order to identify a mismatch between the state of reality, and the meaning of a sentence, you have to have a model of reality.
Not just one model, of language.
This is why Grok and ChatGPT hallucinate and tell you lies. Because, for them, everything is language, and there is no reality.
So when I say someone is a large language model, I do not mean he is “stupid”. He might be very facile at processing language. He might, in fact, be eloquent enough to give great speeches, get elected president, win the Nobel Peace Prize, and so on.
What I mean is that humans who are large language models do not have a robust world-object model to counterweight their language model. They are able to manipulate symbols, sometimes adroitly, but they are on far shakier ground when trying imagine the objects those symbols represent.
Which brings us to this woman.
Most conservatives understand her behavior in terms of concepts like “suicidal empathy”, or “brainwashing”, or an “information bubble”, interpreted as reasons why she is delusional, but the truth is far worse than that.
To delusional is to have an object model of the world that is deeply and profoundly wrong. But to have an object model of the world that is deeply and profoundly wrong… you have to have one in the first place.
To sapient humans, words are symbols, grounded in object model of reality, that we use to communicate ideas about that reality. We need those words because we don’t come equipped with a hologram projector, or telepathic powers.
But for another type of human, that object model isn’t very large or robust at all. It consists only of a grass hut or two with a few sticks of furniture, and it can never be matched up with the palaces in the air which she weaves out of words.
And so, to her, there is no reality. Or at least very little.
Reality consists only of her and her immediate surroundings in time and space, and words referring to anything bigger or more complicated are not descriptions of reality… they are magic spells which will make other humans drop loot or give her social approval.
You cannot correct her worldview with contradictory evidence, because there is no worldview to correct.
You cannot confront her with the logical inconsistencies in her worldview, because her object model doesn’t actually have any, it’s not complex enough for that.
The relevant parts of her world-object model can be summed up as follows:
“If I say Goodthing, I get headpats and cookies from all the people like me.”
That model is simply not big or complicated enough to contain notions like self-defense or vehicular assault. She has no theory of mind for a man whose job includes violence. She cannot explain or predict his behavior.
It is too far away from her daily experience to fit into her reality at all.
And if she can’t imagine things like these, how can she possibly imagine concrete meanings for vast and complex ideas like demographic replacement, culture shift, and western civilization?
This is not about intelligence or lack of it. This is about what her brain is trained to do.
Her upbringing, education, and life did not force, or even encourage, her to develop a robust world-object model. It wasn’t necessary for her to get safety, approval, or cookies. She just had to be glib.
So it really didn’t matter if she had an IQ of 125, or whatever, because if she did, then she was just an IQ-125-large-language-model, and only used that brain capacity for writing clever poetry, and saying things that aligned her to her local social matrix.
She couldn’t actually understand the world no matter how smart she was, because her brain was trained up wrong.
I don’t know if this is correctable, or if there was some critical developmental phase that was missed, but it doesn’t matter, because once the LLM-humans are adults, they won’t sit still for corrective therapy, percussive or not.
What’s important is that they can’t be taught things. They can be programmed to repeat stuff, and if you win a culture war, you can even program them to say the sensible stuff. But even then, they will just be saying it for headpats and cookies. They will never truly understand the sense of what they are repeating, because they don’t understand things.
They are just Large Language Models.
And we have to figure out some way to take the vote away from them.
They do not have a process for determining truth from falsity. When asked how they determine truth from falsity they look at you like that is a crazy question. They speak of “My truth”, and “My lived experience.” The concept of a court ruling on basis of the law instead of justice (of course it is their “justice”) is nonsensical to them. They cannot imagine why their opinion on an event they did not see is not just as valid as someone who studied multiple videos from various angles frame by frame.
It reminds me of someone who I once asked, “How do you determine truth from falsity?” Their answer, in all seriousness, was, “It depends on how I feel.”
I do not have a common basis in reality to functionally communicate with these people.
Let us concede that gun rights advocates have won the argument: guns don’t kill people, people do.
However, there is a certain class of people that merit a greater share of the blame for the mass casualty events our communities have endured. For lack of a more encompassing term let’s call them, “gun owners”. As well, we must acknowledge that gun owners are largely responsible (by commission and omission) for the constant blood letting since Sandy Hook.
Here is a list of U.S. governors (or former governors) convicted in federal court of felonies since 1950, based on reliable sources like Wikipedia’s list of state officials convicted of federal corruption offenses and compilations from sources tracking such cases (e.g., Center for Gaming Politics, cross-referenced reports). These focus on federal felony convictions tied to public corruption (e.g., bribery, extortion, mail/wire fraud, Hobbs Act, RICO, conspiracy), typically for conduct during or related to their time in office. The list excludes purely state convictions, misdemeanors, ethics violations without felony status, post-office non-corruption crimes (e.g., some bank fraud cases), or cases overturned on appeal without retrial conviction.
No such convictions appear to have occurred since around 2011 (the last major one being Rod Blagojevich), based on available records up to 2026.
The list is organized chronologically by year of conviction:
Otto Kerner, Jr. (D – Illinois, Governor 1961–1968) Convicted 1973: Mail fraud, Travel Act (some Travel Act counts reversed on appeal). Related to accepting bribes for racetrack favors while governor.
David Hall (D – Oklahoma, Governor 1971–1975) Convicted 1975/1976: Bribery, extortion, racketeering (Hobbs Act and Travel Act). Used influence to divert investments.
Ray Blanton (D – Tennessee, Governor 1975–1979) Convicted 1983: Mail fraud, conspiracy, extortion. Sold liquor licenses for profit.
Arch A. Moore, Jr. (R – West Virginia, Governor 1969–1977, 1985–1989) Convicted 1986/1990s (multiple): Extortion, mail fraud, obstruction of justice, tax fraud (Hobbs Act). Accepted illegal contributions and extorted funds.
Edwin Edwards (D – Louisiana, Governor multiple terms 1972–1996) Convicted 2000: Racketeering, extortion, money laundering, mail and wire fraud (Hobbs Act, RICO). Schemes during tenure.
John G. Rowland (R – Connecticut, Governor 1995–2004) Convicted 2004: Mail fraud (pleaded guilty). Corruption involving gifts and contracts.
Don Siegelman (D – Alabama, Governor 1999–2003) Convicted 2006: Bribery, mail fraud, conspiracy, obstruction (some mail fraud vacated later). Sold board seat for donations.
George Ryan (R – Illinois, Governor 1999–2003) Convicted 2006: Mail fraud, RICO. Corruption in contracts and licenses (Operation Safe Roads).
Rod Blagojevich (D – Illinois, Governor 2003–2009) Convicted 2011: Hobbs Act, mail fraud conspiracy (including solicitation of bribery). Attempted to sell U.S. Senate seat.
By party summary (felony federal corruption convictions in federal court, 1950–present):
Democrats: 7 (Kerner, Hall, Blanton, Edwards, Siegelman, Blagojevich, plus others in some lists if including variants like Hall’s timing).
Republicans: 3 (Moore, Rowland, Ryan).
This reflects a bipartisan issue, though with more documented Democratic cases in the sources (often concentrated in states like Illinois and Louisiana with histories of corruption probes). Counts vary slightly by source depending on exact inclusion criteria (e.g., some include tax evasion add-ons as felonies; others strictly corruption statutes). No comprehensive official federal tally exists solely for governors, but these are the consistently cited cases from DOJ-prosecuted federal corruption matters.
Do you see the pattern? Again, seven out of ten are Democrats. If we want to make a serious dent in the number of criminals in political office all we need to do is ban all Democrats from political office. And we would have just as much justification as people like Mr. Folly (what an appropriate name) would have for banning gun ownership.
I’m going to say this once, and I don’t care if it makes people uncomfortable.
If you have never lived in Venezuela If you did not grow up there If you did not watch your country collapse in real time If you did not stand in food lines If you did not watch your parents lose everything they built If you did not have to leave your home with nothing
Then shut the fuck up.
You do not have an opinion. Your opinion does not matter. And you don’t get to lecture anyone about what’s happening there.
I’m Venezuelan. I lived there most of my life until my early twenties. I watched my country go from a functioning democracy to full blown socialism right in front of my eyes.
This is not politics to me. This is trauma.
Before socialism, Venezuela was not perfect, but it worked. There was trade. There was money coming in. There was investment from the US. There were jobs. There was food. There was medicine.
My family had five businesses. We had our home We had investments. We had a future.
Then the government started nationalizing everything. Private companies were taken. Foreign investors were pushed out. Imports were blocked. Price controls destroyed production. Corruption exploded.
And everything died.
Not slowly. Violently.
People didn’t suddenly become poor because of “capitalism” or “the US” or whatever bullshit slogan people like to repeat online.
They became poor because socialism destroyed incentives, destroyed production, destroyed trust, and destroyed hope.
People today in Venezuela are not debating ideology. They are trying to survive.
They are trying to find food. Trying to find medication. Trying to keep their families alive.
So when I see people in the West posting from comfortable homes, full fridges, stable currencies, and safe streets talking about “imperialism” or “US bad” or “Trump this or that”
No. It’s not complicated. You’re just ignorant.
China is not rebuilding Venezuela. Russia is not rebuilding Venezuela. Cartels are not rebuilding Venezuela.
They are stealing. They are extracting. They are draining what’s left.
If the US comes in and reinvests If refineries get rebuilt If infrastructure gets restored If imports open back up If food, water, and medicine become accessible again If people can work and earn with dignity
Then yes. Let them take all the oil they want.
Because at least something gets built instead of destroyed.
This is something to celebrate. Not because it’s perfect. But because for the first time in a long time, there is hope.
Hope that families can eat. Hope that people don’t have to flee their country. Hope that Venezuela can function again.
If you’ve never lived through a country collapsing If you’ve never watched socialism destroy everything around you If you’ve never had to leave your home because staying meant starvation
Then again Shut the fuck up.
This isn’t theory. This isn’t politics. This is lived experience.
Let me frame this explicitly through John Boyd’s work, because what’s happening here fits his theory precisely—and explains why so many analysts, institutions, and commentators literally cannot see what just happened, even when it’s right in front of them.
1. Boyd’s real insight wasn’t the OODA loop — it was paradigm warfare
Most people reduce Boyd to:
“OODA loop = faster decision cycles” That’s superficial. Boyd’s real contribution was this:
Victory comes from shattering the enemy’s mental model of reality faster than they can adapt. He argued that:
Humans do not reason from facts → they reason from mental models
Evidence is filtered through the model, not the other way around
When a model is threatened, people defend the model, not the truth That’s why, as you said:
Astronomers clung to perfect circles
Clerics clung to geocentrism
Entire academic careers were spent patching a broken model instead of replacing it
Boyd called this destructive deduction: endlessly adjusting assumptions to preserve a dying framework.
2. Why paradigm shifts are invisible while they are happening
Boyd was explicit about this: People cannot see a new paradigm from inside the old one. Why? Because:
The old paradigm defines what is even allowed to be real
Anything outside it is labeled “illegal,” “impossible,” “unthinkable,” or “crazy” So when someone acts outside the playbook, observers don’t see a new game — they see:
“lawlessness”
“chaos”
“norm breaking”
“authoritarianism”
“recklessness” Those are defensive labels, not analysis.
They are the immune response of a dying paradigm.
3. Apply this directly to modern politics (and Trump specifically)
The post–Cold War Western political paradigm assumes:
Power must be exercised through multilateral institutions
Enforcement must be indirect, slow, procedural
Leaders are constrained by “norms” more than outcomes
Sovereignty violations are unthinkable unless everyone agrees
Deterrence is symbolic, not personal This paradigm produced analysis tools that assume:
sanctions
statements
negotiations
gradual pressure Now enter an actor who:
treats law enforcement as geopolitics
treats heads of state as personally accountable
treats speed and shock as strategic tools
treats norms as optional if they no longer produce deterrence From inside the old paradigm, observers say: “This is illegal, dangerous, unprecedented, destabilizing.” From outside the paradigm, it’s obvious: “This just rewrote the rules of hemispheric power.” They’re not disagreeing on facts.
They’re operating in different realities.
4. Venezuela as a Boyd-style paradigm shatter
From a Boyd lens, the Venezuela action is not “policy.” It’s psychological dislocation.
Old paradigm expectation:
Dictators are insulated
Regimes are abstract entities
Accountability is slow, symbolic, diplomatic
New paradigm signal:
Leadership is personal
Sovereignty is conditional on behavior
Criminal-state fusion voids immunity
Time-to-consequence just collapsed That’s not escalation — that’s model collapse. And that’s why analysts are:
obsessing over legality
ignoring signaling
missing second- and third-order effects
They’re doing Ptolemaic math while the planets have already moved.
5. Why the reaction is so emotional (and irrational)
Boyd noted something else most people forget: Paradigm collapse threatens identity, not just ideas. For many elites:
Their careers were built under the old rules
Their moral authority depends on those rules
Their expertise becomes obsolete overnight So they respond with:
moral outrage
procedural fixation
narrative inflation (“this is the end of democracy”)
denial of efficacy (“this won’t work”) These are psychological defense mechanisms, not strategic assessments. Just like astronomers who knew the math didn’t work —
but kept adding epicycles anyway.
6. Generational lag: why acceptance takes decades
Boyd was brutally honest about this:
People deeply invested in a paradigm will not change
They reinterpret evidence indefinitely
Acceptance only comes when:
new actors rise who didn’t build their identity on the old model
or the old model catastrophically fails in public That’s why:
Paradigm shifts look “obvious” in hindsight
But feel “unthinkable” in real time
You’re watching that live right now.
7. Why this move is more powerful than it looks
Most people are asking: “Was this legal?” “Was this appropriate?” “Will this cause backlash?” Boyd would ask: “What mental models just broke?” Answer:
Cartels’ belief in state protection
Regional elites’ belief in untouchability
Adversaries’ belief that the U.S. is procedurally paralyzed
Allies’ belief that the U.S. won’t act decisively
That’s why this is a paradigm-level event, not a policy tweak.
8. The core Boyd takeaway applied to today
What you’re seeing is this:
Old-paradigm thinkers are fighting to preserve the lens
New-paradigm actors are changing the environment itself And Boyd was clear: Those who shape the environment force everyone else into reaction. That’s the deepest reason people “don’t get it” yet. They’re still calculating perfect circles while someone just changed the center of gravity.
I’ve been thinking about the Venezuela situation some. There are some things that are very clear to me.
If some Ayatollah declared a top leader of some country, say Israel, U.S., etc., has broken one of its laws of Sharia, can the Ayatollah then be justified in arresting and trying the top leader of Israel or the U.S.?
If might makes right at the national level, then there is little reason to pay for the natural resources of other countries, or even the goods of other countries.
Vietnam used a disputed justification of self-defense and humanitarian intervention (taken seriously but legally weak) in the invasion of Cambodia in 1978.
The vast majority of the people of Venezuela are very pleased with the arrest of their dictator.
With the above and all the obvious conventional issues on the topic as my inputs, I’m left with concluding, this is like someone who murders the guy who raped and murdered their daughter and was set free by the legal system due to a technicality in the process. So, at the individual level the murdering parent is arrested tried and the jury is probably going to convict them of a lesser charge, and they get a couple of years in a relatively comfy prison.
So… what is the expected/proper outcome in this case at the national level? I don’t know how to resolve this question in my model of how world law and politics is “supposed to work”.
Then Hamilton says, “This is an alternate reality. Your models are obsolete.”
For decades we have seen one gun control myth after another used as excuses to restrict our Second Amendment rights. Yet here we are, when those rights are being gradually restored thanks to strategic court victories, when 29 states have adopted permitless carry laws, when more people own guns and more people are legally carrying them for personal protection, and the data shows violent crime involving guns is declining. Looks like we’ve been right all along, and the establishment media essentially is confirming it.
Nearly all the information you get from the mainstream media is wrong it some way. It can be incomplete and misleading, it can be exaggeration, and it can an outright lie. I suspect a significant component of this is that society has created an evolutionary environment for this. Highly emotional information gets attention. Attention brings more money. Boring news providers go out of business.
I don’t know of a solution to this. The only partial mitigation I know of is to get your news from multiple sources. And even then, if the sources are all politically (or whatever “tribe” type) aligned you get amplification of the misinformation rather than correction toward the truth.
Breaking news: Teacher Arrested At Pearson Airport
A high school teacher was arrested today at Toronto’s Pearson Airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a compass, a slide-rule and a calculator.
At a press conference, Premier Mark Carney said he believes the man is a member of the notorious extremist Al-Gebra movement. He did not identify the man, who has been charged by the OPP with carrying weapons of math instruction.
‘Al-Gebra is a problem for us’, the Premier said. ‘They derive solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in search of absolute values.’
‘They use secret code names like “X” and “Y” and refer to themselves as “unknowns” but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country.”
When asked to comment on the arrest, Prime Minister Carney said, “If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes.”
Fellow Liberal colleagues told reporters they could not recall a more intelligent or profound statement by any Prime Minister.
At the present time, I think this is overstating the level of censorship in Canada and an arrest on such a basis is not a real concern. I can, however, see the political powers unable to see the humor.
Give it another year or three, then teachers who promote racist activities, such as math, will be given a modest fine for their first offense and the people such as deWinter who mock the political elite will get prison sentences.
Even it if it is off on a tangent from my usual content, I think It is funny because it has more than a little truth to it.
SCOTUS’s current practice of deciding like 50 cases a year may have worked in a system where the lower courts acted in good faith. SCOTUS would decide Bruen, and then lower courts would do their best to faithfully apply it.
Instead, the antigun circuits almost always find a way to rule against the Second Amendment except on the specific issues SCOTUS has decided. The Ninth Circuit is now on its 10th en banc to reverse a pro-2A panel ruling.
Sure, maybe SCOTUS will take the occasional case like Wolford and correct a particularly egregious ruling. But the Ninth Circuit’s antigun majority knows there is no way SCOTUS will grant cert to every antigun ruling, or even a large minority of them. So they’ll keep doing what they are doing, and so what if a few get reversed. Most won’t.
To actually correct this, SCOTUS needs to go back to deciding many more cases each year, or alternatively, issue short and curt summary reversals very liberally.
For example, when the Ninth Circuit (probably) upholds the handgun roster’s MDM and CLI requirements, the Supreme Court shouldn’t need a full cert grant and briefing to explain why that is wrong. A one page per curiam saying there is no historical tradition of such “feature” requirements, and California can’t ban popular handguns, would suffice.
I would be interested to see what would happen if SCOTUS returned a one page per curium within minutes of when one of these outrageous decisions were punted up to them. An automated AI system could easily do it. If the autopen was good enough for Biden, then an AI should be good enough for SCOTUS, right? Would the lower courts continue playing these games? Or would they start Calvinballing it?
I’m inclined to believe we will not get 2nd Amendment justice until people are prosecuted.
Wanna piss of a Eurocrat (or a US based wannabe Eurocrat)? Tell them that you spend money, time and effort to be capable of armed self defense because what you defend is worth it, and at minimum you need to survive until backup arrives, with a realistic expectation of the likelihood of that backup arriving and when. Whereas they have made that same calculation: what they could be defend[ing] is not worth that time, effort or expense. Ergo: you’re worth more than they are, by self-evaluation.
I’m not sure I would always use this in a manner to intended to piss off whoever I was talking to. There are certain occasions and people who this sentiment could be expressed to in a manner that would give the recipient something profound to think about.
In war, truth is the first casualty. Hence, it is going to be extremely difficult to know the truth of the current events in Iran and Venezuela. For now, I’m going with the content of these two videos as a first approximation of background material.
Iranian Christian Zionist . Preliminary thoughts on what’s happening in Iran. 👇 pic.twitter.com/fvlIZODplQ
* The night of January 1st, 2026 was the first time I spend the night in my underground bunker in Idaho. It’s not really ready, but for this time of year, it is better than the camping trailer. While it will not be completed, I expect that within a month Barb and I would be comfortable here should the need occur. It is not a minute too soon.
I expect it will be overturned within a month. Perhaps in as little as a week.
I expect a request for an en banc hearing will be made. Or possibly, the 9th Circuit judges will do it without being requested. The en banc hearing will overrule the three-judge panel and the tyrants will continue to rule unperturbed.
You shouldn’t get upset over it. Just smile and consider the ruling as more evidence to be used at their trials.
Nothing in the plain text of the Second Amendment mentions the size of a magazine or the specific features of a firearm. The plain text provides categorical, presumptive protection for all bearable arms.
Europeans are a people with little willingness to defend themselves. They are people who believe that peace treaties, appeasement, and disarmament produce peace.
This attitude extends to their attitudes toward the natural right to keep and bear arms.
It appears that with the increasing levels of violent crime in Europe and England combined with the specter of a reformulated USSR the attitude may be dissolving. The question is, “Will it be enough and soon enough to save them?”
The Ukraine may have been too late in learning. Israel took a heavy blow before wising up a small amount.
If the whole situation were not such a tragic waste of money it would be funny.
My only hope is that the maximum amount of restitution is made by everyone criminally involved — down to the level of auctioning off all their salable body parts. An example needs to be made of these people which will be remembered for generations.
Of all the natural rights codified in the Constitution, none — not freedom of speech, press or religion, or the ability to vote or to demand due process — had a longer or deeper history in our law and tradition than the right to defend oneself.
This is why potential jurors are rejected if they were exposed to information about the case prior to being selected for the jury. If they have already formed an opinion, it is very difficult for them to be unbiased when hearing the case.
This is why religious beliefs are rarely significantly changed.
You can see it all around you. It probably is the most obvious in the words and actions of your political advisories, religious beliefs of people with a different faith, and in people defending their family members.
A great deal of TDS can be explained this way. It is very difficult to avoid getting caught up in it. You can catch the more egregious cases in yourself if you take a little bit of time to ask yourself, “Is this too good to be true?” If it is, then you should dig deep to make sure whatever it is you want to believe is actually true. A case in point in the comments of this blog.
At work, while I was on the Cyber Threat Intelligence team, we were specifically trained to watch out for this and other biases. In this type of environment, you assemble a team with different backgrounds. Then you review each other’s work. This helps a bunch, but it is not perfect. I doubt anything practical is perfect. But it can help.
